Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations

Abstract

This article examines the Dutch and English East India companies and the mainly British and French Caribbean slave plantations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as institutions embodying features of both “premodern” and “postmodern” economies. Because they endured and produced profits over long periods of time, neither of these institutions can be dismissed as “primitive accumulation.” The East India companies were state-licensed monopolies but also huge, vertically integrated, multinational corporations funded through share sales on the world’s first stock markets. Plantation slavery can be seen as an advanced form of constantly improving agrarian capitalism in which wage labor is replaced by the capital/chattel of purchased human beings. Arguments and evidence for a “patrimonialist” or “hypercapitalist” understanding of both institutions are considered with the conclusion that they are “hybrid,” but less in postcolonialist cultural terms than in the problematic way they fit into the genealogy of modern European capitalism.